What makes a space sacred? These essays have as their collective point of departure the division Mircea Eliade posited in 1959 between “the sacred” and “the profane,” a division that Eliade himself held to be “a primordial experience, homologizable to a founding of the world” (The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion [New York: Harcourt, 1989 (1959), 20–21]). That connection at once provides a coherent organizing concept at the center of the collection and, for this reviewer, poses the core problem with the essays.
In their introduction, Spicer and Hamilton invoke Eliade's “paradigm,” which is the lens through which they then sketch some of the findings of the archaeology and architectural history of medieval and early modern Europe. Missing from that introduction is either an engagement with the psychology of religion—whether specific places are perceived as “sacred” or not—or work on human place-making, such as that of Yi-Fu Tuan or Robert Sack, which takes up the ways in which individuals and communities accord specific sites religious meaning.
Following an introduction, the book is divided into two parts. The first takes up “the existence of sacred space within a domestic context” (23). Diana Webb's “Domestic Space and Devotion in the Middle Ages” and Jeanne Nuechterlein's “The Domesticity of Sacred Space in the Fifteenth-Century Netherlands” are both largely speculative pieces, cast in the subjunctive voice. The remaining three articles in the first section are carefully grounded in a range of sources, offering much that is helpful for thinking about the problem of “sacred space.” In “Private Rooms in the Monastic Architecture of Habsburg Spain,” Lisa Banner provides a detailed history of the construction of rooms, commissioned and paid for by lay patrons who sought a space within the cloister where they were not integrated into, but lived in closer proximity to, the monastic life. Among her findings were the number of regulations for women, who found themselves within cloisters at the moment they became widowed. Richard L. Williams provides a careful history of the English Catholic hierarchy's effort to maintain continuities of use of sacred space in Reformation England. In so doing, he is able to delineate with wonderful precision different conceptions of “sacred space,” as well as to differentiate ways in which space might be set apart as more or less holy. The final essay in the first part, Annabel Ricketts's “Designing for Protestant Worship: the Private Chapels of the Cecil Family,” which Claire Grapper and Caroline Knight brought to conclusion, provides a detailed history of the commissioning and construction of chapels within the Cecil family's houses in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The second section takes up “the definition of sacred space in the public realm” (23). The problems inhering in the construct public/private become apparent in the first essay, by June L. Mecham, “A Northern Jerusalem: Transforming the Spatial Geography of the Convent of Wienhausen.” At the center of this article are two manuscripts, which provide wonderful details of the nuns' observance of Stations of the Cross within the convent. But what, in a cloister that was also a pilgrimage site, is “public”? Tim Pestell explores more generally methods archaeologists have been developing to connect found objects to specific places in “Using Material Culture to Define Holy Space: the Bromholm Project.” Stijn Bossuyt offers a detailed description of the use of space prescribed for a number of Flemish churches in various liturgical books. Andrew Spicer offers some of the findings on the emergence of Protestant consecrations from his larger research project in “‘God Will Have a House’: Defining Sacred Space and Rites of Consecration in Early Seventeenth-Century England.” Graeme Murdock offers one of the very few discussions of Reformed churches in Hungary in “‘Pure and White’: Reformed Space for Worship in Early Seventeenth-Century Hungary,” which also explores contestations of that space, as Hungary was forcibly brought under Catholic rule. Cynthia Lawrence offers a close reading of Rubens's altarpiece as it constitutes “sacred space” in “Rubens's Raising of the Cross in Context: The ‘Early Christian’ Past and the Evocation of the Sacred in Post-Tridentine Antwerp.” Judi Loach explores Catholic and particularly Jesuit efforts to erase Reformed sites and redraw patterns of secular and religious activities in Lyon, in “The Consecration of the Civic Realm.” Simon Dixon addresses most explicitly and thoughtfully of all the articles the possibility that “the sacred” might be differently conceived—and not just differently located—in “The Priest, the Quakers and the Second Conventicle Act: the Battle for Gracechurch Street Meeting House, 1670.” Eric Johnson's essay does not so much explore “sacred space” as its political uses in the two decades before 1789 in “La Ville Sonnant: The Politics of Sacred Space in Avignon on the Eve of the French Revolution.”
At the center of Eliade's discussion of “sacred space” is the assumption that “the sacred” is an absolute reality, autonomous of any single human being (21). Such a point of departure does not accommodate very well exactly the kinds of debates about the nature of God's presence and his self-revelation that so divided European Christians in the early modern period. Insofar as individual essays attend to the ways historical individuals spoke about the spaces and places in their lives, they move away from Eliade's notion of “the sacred” to something far more nuanced—the different kinds of consecration for naves, altars, and private chapels, for instance—and in so doing, they help us to better understand the ways in which Christians in the past defined the relationship between their God and the places of their lives.
